categorical Ask for the westerns section in most Australian bookshops and you’ll probably be greeted with a blank stare. But if you’re curious about this classic genre, you can hunt a few gems down. LACHLAN JOBBINS separates the wheat from the chaff. ven in the US the westerns genre is in decline. But things haven’t always been that way. From the dime novels of the late 1800s to the pulps of the 1950s, westerns once enjoyed an enormous readership – if not critical appreciation.There are millions of westerns in second-hand bookshops today – many of them dated and terribly formulaic. Some were set down for the ages, others dashed off by writers paid by the word.You might have to dig a little to find the gold, but it’s well worth doing. If you want to be transported and challenged to see the past in a new light, you want a ‘revisionist’ western – Charles Portis or Ron Hansen. If you just want an adventure that will keep you turning the pages for a few hours, it’s time for the pulps – Max Brand or Louis L’Amour. Or maybe you want something in between: try one of Zane Grey’s classics, or a modern epic by Larry McMurtry. I don’t claim to have read hundreds, but I’ve certainly read a few score – following trails trodden by millions of readers before me. Here then, are my picks of the genre. *** The western is perhaps America’s only unique literary genre: a heady mix of cowboys and Indians, ranchers and train-robbers, women in distress (and undress), gamblers, prospectors and mountain men. It combines history and fiction, heroes and villains, and the great myth of the West: freedom, justice and room to move. Many westerns deal with moral issues – murder, justice, revenge – and use real events and people as their basis. In the late 1800s, dime novels featured outlaws like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid – often written during their lifetimes, and bearing little connection with the truth. Events like the shootout at the OK Corral, the killing of Jesse James by Robert Ford, and the Johnson County War have been treated countless times in fiction. The early novels of the west were already nostalgic – looking back to the period between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century.They were written for a rapidly urbanising (eastern) population who had little experience of the world beyond the cities.The idea of the frontier – of Huckleberry Finn’s ‘lighting out for the territory’ – had tremendous appeal for a society which was divided into a few extremely wealthy ‘self-made men’ and millions of wage slaves. The Old West of the imagination was a place of possibility.You could strike it rich, escape your past, find an honest woman (or man), and practise your beliefs in whatever manner you wished. Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) is considered the first true